Book documents Kissinger's role in Chile

Thirty years after a military coup toppled Salvador Allende from the Chilean presidency, a new book details how Henry Kissinger stood at the crux of White House efforts to bring Mr Allende down and prop up his successor, General Augusto Pinochet.

The coup, which took place on September 11, 1973, led Mr Allende to commit suicide as Chilean Air Force planes strafed the presidential palace. It marked Chile's descent into 17 years of military dictatorship, during which 3200 Chileans died at the hands of authorities.

Kissinger served Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford as national security adviser and secretary of state.

The Pinochet File, by Peter Kornbluh, shows how the 1973 military coup represented the culmination of White House strategy to remove Mr Allende, a democratically elected socialist who inspired ferocious opposition from the Nixon administration and some US companies doing business in Chile.

The book draws on 24,000 previously secret government documents from 1970 to 1990 that were declassified in the waning days of the Clinton administration.

In the US and Chile, Kissinger, 80, faces legal challenges by the survivors of the military's victims. Travel to Chile is out of the question for him, and he is usually accompanied by a State Department security detail.

In his memoirs, Kissinger acknowledged participating in a Nixon-ordered CIA plot to prod Chilean military officers into blocking Mr Allende's inauguration in 1970.

However, he insists that he called it off on October 15, 1970, a month before Mr Allende took office. But Kornbluh writes that Kissinger called off the plot only because he believed the Chilean generals were not ready to pull it off successfully.

An indirect coup attempt went forward anyway when Chilean officers directed the fatal shooting on October 22 of Chile's top general, Rene Schneider, a vigorous opponent of military intervention in civilian affairs.

After Mr Allende's inauguration, Kissinger forged a new doctrine to "create pressures, exploit weakness [and] magnify obstacles" in Chile in order to hasten Mr Allende's downfall, according to a November 1970 briefing memo written by Kissinger and cited by Kornbluh.

In the following three years, under Kissinger's watchful eye, the CIA funnelled up to $US7 million into political parties opposed to Allende, and Chile's leading newspaper, El Mercurio. Business, labour, civic and paramilitary organisations were also recipients of CIA largesse, Kornbluh shows.

In 1976 Kissinger secretly assured Pinochet of continuing US support, even as he publicly questioned the dictator's human rights record, Kornbluh says.